My lovely little MP3 walkman has packed up. After a busy three months or so using it to dabble in the wonders of MP3's and iPods, I found the other day that I had seemingly loaded too much music/audio onto the player (or that some of it was corrupted), so now I have to look around at other means of downloading music from computer. Well, it was at a cheap price, I must admit.
All the same, in bygone days such gadgets would have lasted rather longer than just 3 months. I still generally prefer creaky but more reliable cassettes over CDs. The music shops in their infinite wisdom decided to remove cassette music from their shelves, as well as the much lamented but still popular and reliable vinyl - why else would they be called record shops, after all?
Current technologies have their flaws, and may well be a "quick fix". I can see DVDs for example (which have supplanted good old video) themselves being supplanted by downloads or much smaller forms of entertainment storage.
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Your are correct with your assumptions. I think DVD is already on the way out...
Standard DVD format is 11 years old now - it killed laserdisc - and is gradually being replaced with Sony's "Blu-Ray" format, which itself is already considered "old" technology - in favour of downloads or "solid state" and "flash memory" technology.
hmmm...an interesting issue...how technology moves on and how big-business uses this to make more money from us. For instance, you could have bought "Star Wars" on Super 8, then on video casette, laser-disc, video-disc and dvd in various re-issues, and soon blu-ray, then...... count the cash slipping out of your bank account as it gets marketed in a new format. :)
think i'll chip in,too.
i suspect it was your mp3 player that was at fault,joe... not the actual device,so to speak.
try investing in an ipod,they are available at a very reasonable price nowadays,and despite what we would all like to think about the eveil corporations and the like,they are an indispensable item.
cassettes,indeed!!!
yuck,
hissy,crackly,messy,spooling all over the place...?
what's to like,for goodness sake?
For one thing Jamie, (video) cassettes don't freeze in mid-frame and strobe horribly like that DVD of 'The Escaped Nun' did that I tried to play at yours once. I also confess I've lost a few great music tapes that got chewed up in the machine.
Btw, have you seen the film 'Wall-E'? There's a scene where he plays the film 'Hello Dolly' on a *video* tape that lasts for 700 (and 20) years!
I've thought about iPods, but I'm still feeling my way around this kind of technology. If the prices are quite low, then as you say it's certainly something to be considered.
DVD's do skip and freeze sometimes, sure, but then I've had a lot of *VIDEO* tapes that over the years have snapped (and then even after my poor attempts to repair them) haven't been playable....so in the bin they went. You get problems with both formats. In support of DVD - they are easier to store than VHS! They are also cheaper to produce which has lead to huge cost savings for both producers and consumers.
As for music casettes...ugh, hate tape, the sound quality on them was dreadful. That's why CD has been such a huge hit over the last 25 years.
Oh, didn't lovely little 'Wall-E' use a 'Betamax' video tape?? Old formats, eh?! I bet he had the "Star Wars" soundtrack album on 8-track on his shelf... :)
http://theswca.com/images-speci/8tracks/8tracks.html
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